Who puts cumin in their Green Chili!?

The other day while we were sitting in the Metro Diner in Culver City waiting for our truck to get fixed, I was reading a column, in I think was the LA Times, by a food critic about his latest trip to New Mexico, he said he had spent a week there and had only eaten 21 meals that contained green chillies. Wow, someone who misses green chili as much as I do. He commented about how it was now possible to get real fresh roasted New Mexican green chillies in some parts of Southern California now and how the Northern New Mexican cuisine has really started to infiltrate other areas of the nation, which I think is great. Then at the end of the article he prints a recipe for a green chili sauce that includes cumin, that's where he lost me.

So we arrive in Mesa, AZ yesterday and we're pretty hungry after the long drive from South Pasadena and we decide to go have lunch at a place that our friends recommended called the Blue Adobe Grill. The Blue Adobe calls themselves a Santa Fe New Mexican restaurant and has all sorts of 'New Mexican' offerings grilled over pecan wood. We're on our way to Taos, we can really wait until we get there to eat some real Taos cooking and so we opt for something simple, the 'Green Chili Cheese Burger' grilled over pecan wood and served with fries. Having spent some time in California and having already had the experience of someone messing up something as simple as adding whole roasted or diced green chillies to a burger, which I don't even care if it's the canned Ortega chillies when I'm that far away from home,
I asked the guy, "what is in the green chili?"
"Oh" he says "just basically a green chili sauce"
well that sends up a red flag, I should of known, there is no 'sauce' involved when all you're doing is adding diced chillies to a cheese burger.
So I ask specifically, "is there any cumin in the sauce?"
"Oh no" he says. "It's just green chillies and a little flour to thicken it."
So the burger comes and yes there is cumin in the sauce! There's no mistaking it, it's a very distinctive taste! Maybe it's just me, I don't care for the taste of cumin, people tend to add too much and it just ruins the taste of the dish. I don't add it to my green chili and I don't remember ever having it made with cumin by anyone else in New Mexico that wasn't a TexMex type place. This is something that's been introduced by who? I don't know, my friend Pollen blames it on the hippies, I think it was Texans. Oh and by the way, it's also more commonly pronounced koom'in instead of Q'min as these waiters like to say, so stop correcting me!

What I really hate is when people put something on their menu and call it say 'Buffalo Chicken Wings' If that chef has never been to Buffalo and has never had real authentic Buffalo Chicken Wings and he's not going to follow the original recipe to the T and he's comes up with his own recipe that includes teriyaki or BBQ sauce or some other thing and serve it with ranch dressing instead of blue cheese then call it something else.